Second Draft
Second Draft is the fruit of exchange between Nashville artists Kristen Parke and Le Dillingham. The work uses language and writing as an anchor to consider the relationship between the mutable self and ever-inscrutable others. Processes of obfuscating and revealing allow Second Draft to explore the complexities of memory and communication as the pieces become surrogates for human relationships, including that between the artists themselves. Working in an epistolary fashion, Parke and Dillingham trade pieces back and forth, as though notes or letters. The work is primarily ceramic: a material that interests the artists both conceptually, in its transformative and tactile journey to permanence; as well as functionally, in its capacity to generate a utilitarian and purposeful exchange between artist and patron. The body of work is altered, layered, carved, excavated, mapped, erased, reworked: a second draft, rendered at times vulnerable, at times hidden, revelatory of the interior world – as our selves, through experience, are written and re-written in perpetuity.
